Anyone else get the impression that the game is seriously forest-bound? It seems like all I do is get people self-sufficient food-wise (which takes a RIDICULOUS amount of wood in itself) and then keep throwing down wood or magical forest.
Maybe there's some super 31337 trick I'm missing, but that seriously detracts from the game...
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NASA said some other probe peaked around 21 miles a second, so I don't see whay this is so incredible. 28 years of impulse makes velocity very very high.
With the old computer that was using so much power: did you notice any of the following:
* Smoke * Extreme heat (see above) * Some system voltage being reported too low * Discoloration of the metal case....
You can always pull components to see what's grounding, assuming its not in the power supply. Before you try to avoid grounding, make sure it is in fact the problem.
If the system is anonymous, then it seems that anyone could malign a minor with impunity, with almost certianty as to their safety in doing so. What mechanisms would be in place to ensure that the system does not turn into a way to earn money via libel? (If it were to have some kind of report tracking, how would that change its effectiveness? Fewer call-ins due to bona fide retribution fears?) It seems that a monetary incentive to anonymously harm someone is begging to be abused.
Sounds good. Then sit back and wait for the TLAM-N's to come from the nearest carrier and blow your country to hell. This is the joy of carrier battle groups. The fight will be brought immediately to your home turf. Even if you used nonnuclear EMPs, you would still be seeing a lot of Tomahawks flying into your country with conventional, cluster, and non-nuc-EMP warheads. If we shot 200-odd at Osama Bin Laden to get the press off the Lewinsky thing, imagine what we'd do if someone REALLY pissed us off. You forget the old military equation. Infantry + cluster munitions = pink mist. To engage ground troops in any meaningful way is to provoke the wrath of offshore fleets, falling squarely into the "bad things" category. Not to mention the fact that these chaff-dropping bombers would have to stay airborne for, oh, say 10 minutes, which is hard to do with F-14's and Phoenix missiles "all up in" your airspace.
And where's this "crippled" argument coming from? (Soldier + M16 + GPS) - GPS = perfectly capable of performing.
Wouldn't said USB dongle have to have some processing power then? If it can't handle challenge/response then it would seem that the public and private keys are uploaded to the "USB host" and then memorized. I'm too tired to properly analyze this, but it seems that keeping the chip's CPU powerful enough to be {fast, secure} would cause high prices.
Maybe trusted terminals where the public/private keys are changed periodically. (keep the last 3 so you only have to log in once a month or something) Actually, a one-week or so expiration on the codes would make password (or dongle replication) cartels pretty annoying to maintain.
And the radio man says it is a beautiful night out there and the radio man says Rock and Roll lives
I was referring to non-mechanical keys. A mechanical key reader for a computer is probably going to lose (horribly) on price/performance to an electronic reader.
The method I was thinking of at the time of the original post was mag-stripe style readers. These demagnetize annoyingly often and are not overly difficult to copy.
Smart chips (a la AMEX's Blue card) would be OK, if there were readers for them. A mechanically simpler (thus cheaper) alternative would be the ID buttons made by Dallas Semiconductor. Two contacts, powered by the reader, and they have quite a large data capacity. (I don't have the link anymore.) These microchip-style authentications would be more resistant to replay attacks than magstripe.
And the radio man says it is a beautiful night out there and the radio man says Rock and Roll lives
I buy a CD I tell beam-it that I own the CD I leave the CD in my car I can still listen to it at a friend's machine, even if I forget and leave my machine in Windows (no FTP).
The biggest problem, as the authors noted, is the password-cartel issue. Carrying around hardware auth is about as annoying as carrying around the CD. At least with the current state of the art.
And the radio man says it is a beautiful night out there and the radio man says Rock and Roll lives
I kinda wish I didn't use all my moderator points in the "how to fix/." thread last night.
Don't post just for the sake of posting. I'm sure the old hard drives at Andover don't need any more strain. Especially for pointless vacuous drivel.
Go ahead and nuke me down for OT, it doesn't matter much. If we want/. to get fixed, we have to do it logged in. While only AC's complain, nobody will take it all that seriously. Be unpopular, complain while logged in. Maybe once people start sacrificing their precious karma (really, who cares?) others will start doing it as well, until karma is no longer our focus here.
Ever heard of mutually assured destruction? It's a little different these days. Now it seems to be fire-a-nuke-and-we-turn-your-country-into-a-self-l ighting-glass-floored-parking-lot.
The offensive capability of using nuclear weapons is not worth the cost of having nuclear weapons used on YOUR country. Add to this the fact the the entire nuclear-armed world will be all over you like white on rice, and it's not very good, unless you're trying to get "dealt with".
Look at what a war is supposed to accomplish these days. They're not usually land grabs -- the UN has pretty much shown that those are no longer allowed. What they do is show power. The intent is not to leave acres of scorched earth or to kill off the civilian population, but to remove the enemy's ability to make war against you or your allies (in the case of "defensive-strikes") or to remove their high-value targets (hydro plants, power stations, military labs, etc etc) in the case of offensive strikes.
The point is that none of these targets require the power of nuclear/thermonuclear weapons. FAE (fuel-air explosion) is approximately 5x as powerful as the equivalent mass of TNT. As a matter of fact, our military advisors reccomend that we abstain from using them much, because they're so powerful they look like nukes. With none of the messy cleanup/politics of having tossed heavy unstable metals all over the place. Unless you're trying to take out mountain-bunkers (NORAD, etc) you don't really need nuclear weapons to do it.
To most directly answer your question: if someone starts tossing around high-yield nuclear weapons, that person is a threat to EVERY nation on earth, and has indirectly attacked them via environmental damage. This implicit declaration of war is all it would take for most countries to send some toys over (sir, there's a US carrier group en route. uhhhhh...) and end that little problem. Since nobody is crazy enough to WANT that to happen (see previous example re: glass-floor), nukes are generally saved for last-ditch counterstrikes. Thus, in a way, nukes are solely defensive weapons.
I'm not worried until they get retroviral capability. (Viruses that modify DNA) Of course, when that happens, we better have something to stop viruses, cause we're all capital-s-screwed if something goes awry.
Actually, the spectre of Katzism has overtaken me. Retroviruses are just a tool. If we found that altering a bit of a chromosome would cure disease, why not?
Maybe these IQ 165 people will develop semiautonomous robots to dig ditches for them...
As far as war goes, I personally don't forsee war happening. With the UN and all, it's pointless to attack someone, because you're sanctioned into depression. Not to mention the US likes to wave its big, angry, Teddy-Roosevelt-on-crack stick at people. Cruise missiles provide a politically "safe" (no pilot to kill/capture) way of blowing stuff up. *Terrorism*, maybe. But not formally declared wars.
Incidentally, I believe the USMC has a program to develop some kind of very-small-very-smart mobile artillery platform. But consider that unreliable at best, I can't even remember where I heard it.
This all will still not solve society's largest problem: Katz will still complain about the robots.
>Military pilots have an entire array of informative widgits other than nightvission for use when landing...
I actually know a little about this... someone I know very well does DOD acquisitions, and in the last few years bought FLIR (forward looking infra-red) pods. They ran a little over $2k....
Another thing to consider, airfields and carrier decks have lights on them, something country roads usually don't.
As for the people relying on the system too much, give people little transponders, and the wrist-thingies beep when a certified moron (transmitted by car microwave dish) is approaching. If the car detects an entity without a transponder, it must be an animal. That's where the grille-mounted gauss rifle comes into play...
I'd guess oncoming traffic appears as a blob with a bright block (front radiator), and cars ahead of you either one or two points (exhaust)
While it's probably good for detecting cars, how can it detect people that well? I'd guess in the summer south of the Mason-Dixon line a person wouldn't show up very well, unless the thing has some ridiculous gain. But then another car on the road would make it auto-attenuate back down. Maybe it calls anything above ambient an object and displays a 'on' pixel for it.
Did anyone read about the reverse-collision thing? It says it works when you're going >= 3mph in reverse. Now if I were paranoid enough about backing in to get this, why would I be going in over 3mph, especially when I get close? Typo or something?
Cool as 3Com is, I doubt they managed to raise the transmission speed over copper. They talk about optimized firmware -- they probably reprogrammed it so that it gets the data out onto the PCI bus faster. That or simply upgraded the microcontroller inside (freq. up, lambda down.)
Notice the qualification on the website, that the 43% is achieved when calling some weird 3com equipment.
Car Wars *does* exist. I believe they even came out with a third edition a while ago. Existential blue crayon launchers, anyone? It's over at Steve Jackson Games
Slashdot Mirror
Wow. I have been owned. Here's your recipt...
Thanks...
Anyone else get the impression that the game is seriously forest-bound? It seems like all I do is get people self-sufficient food-wise (which takes a RIDICULOUS amount of wood in itself) and then keep throwing down wood or magical forest.
Maybe there's some super 31337 trick I'm missing, but that seriously detracts from the game...
...and/or flame amongst yourselves. Anyone else noticed this trend?
Jameco elecronics is pretty good -- I've never used Digikey, but Jameco certainly has an extensive catelog.
www.jameco.com
Don't get the idea I'm bashing Sun for NOT GPLing it, I was actually replying to an earlier poster in his statement that it was "probably GPL"
This doesn't look like the GPL I know...
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...uses a mixture of mini-programs (for stuff like a process/job scheduler) and the Linux kernel (making us add in system calls and use them).
The interested reader is referred to our project list
NASA said some other probe peaked around 21 miles a second, so I don't see whay this is so incredible. 28 years of impulse makes velocity very very high.
With the old computer that was using so much power: did you notice any of the following:
* Smoke
* Extreme heat (see above)
* Some system voltage being reported too low
* Discoloration of the metal case....
You can always pull components to see what's grounding, assuming its not in the power supply. Before you try to avoid grounding, make sure it is in fact the problem.
If the system is anonymous, then it seems that anyone could malign a minor with impunity, with almost certianty as to their safety in doing so. What mechanisms would be in place to ensure that the system does not turn into a way to earn money via libel?
(If it were to have some kind of report tracking, how would that change its effectiveness? Fewer call-ins due to bona fide retribution fears?) It seems that a monetary incentive to anonymously harm someone is begging to be abused.
Sounds good. Then sit back and wait for the TLAM-N's to come from the nearest carrier and blow your country to hell. This is the joy of carrier battle groups. The fight will be brought immediately to your home turf. Even if you used nonnuclear EMPs, you would still be seeing a lot of Tomahawks flying into your country with conventional, cluster, and non-nuc-EMP warheads. If we shot 200-odd at Osama Bin Laden to get the press off the Lewinsky thing, imagine what we'd do if someone REALLY pissed us off. You forget the old military equation. Infantry + cluster munitions = pink mist. To engage ground troops in any meaningful way is to provoke the wrath of offshore fleets, falling squarely into the "bad things" category. Not to mention the fact that these chaff-dropping bombers would have to stay airborne for, oh, say 10 minutes, which is hard to do with F-14's and Phoenix missiles "all up in" your airspace.
And where's this "crippled" argument coming from? (Soldier + M16 + GPS) - GPS = perfectly capable of performing.
Wouldn't said USB dongle have to have some processing power then? If it can't handle challenge/response then it would seem that the public and private keys are uploaded to the "USB host" and then memorized. I'm too tired to properly analyze this, but it seems that keeping the chip's CPU powerful enough to be {fast, secure} would cause high prices.
Maybe trusted terminals where the public/private keys are changed periodically. (keep the last 3 so you only have to log in once a month or something) Actually, a one-week or so expiration on the codes would make password (or dongle replication) cartels pretty annoying to maintain.
And the radio man says it is a beautiful night out there
and the radio man says Rock and Roll lives
I was referring to non-mechanical keys. A mechanical key reader for a computer is probably going to lose (horribly) on price/performance to an electronic reader.
The method I was thinking of at the time of the original post was mag-stripe style readers. These demagnetize annoyingly often and are not overly difficult to copy.
Smart chips (a la AMEX's Blue card) would be OK, if there were readers for them. A mechanically simpler (thus cheaper) alternative would be the ID buttons made by Dallas Semiconductor. Two contacts, powered by the reader, and they have quite a large data capacity. (I don't have the link anymore.) These microchip-style authentications would be more resistant to replay attacks than magstripe.
And the radio man says it is a beautiful night out there
and the radio man says Rock and Roll lives
Consider the following case:
I buy a CD
I tell beam-it that I own the CD
I leave the CD in my car
I can still listen to it at a friend's machine, even if I forget and leave my machine in Windows (no FTP).
The biggest problem, as the authors noted, is the password-cartel issue. Carrying around hardware auth is about as annoying as carrying around the CD. At least with the current state of the art.
And the radio man says it is a beautiful night out there
and the radio man says Rock and Roll lives
I kinda wish I didn't use all my moderator points in the "how to fix /." thread last night.
/. to get fixed, we have to do it logged in. While only AC's complain, nobody will take it all that seriously. Be unpopular, complain while logged in. Maybe once people start sacrificing their precious karma (really, who cares?) others will start doing it as well, until karma is no longer our focus here.
Don't post just for the sake of posting. I'm sure the old hard drives at Andover don't need any more strain. Especially for pointless vacuous drivel.
Go ahead and nuke me down for OT, it doesn't matter much. If we want
My $/50
(5VCK4Z!)
As Dr. Evil says: "Riiiiight"
l ighting-glass-floored-parking-lot.
Ever heard of mutually assured destruction? It's a little different these days. Now it seems to be fire-a-nuke-and-we-turn-your-country-into-a-self-
The offensive capability of using nuclear weapons is not worth the cost of having nuclear weapons used on YOUR country. Add to this the fact the the entire nuclear-armed world will be all over you like white on rice, and it's not very good, unless you're trying to get "dealt with".
Look at what a war is supposed to accomplish these days. They're not usually land grabs -- the UN has pretty much shown that those are no longer allowed. What they do is show power. The intent is not to leave acres of scorched earth or to kill off the civilian population, but to remove the enemy's ability to make war against you or your allies (in the case of "defensive-strikes") or to remove their high-value targets (hydro plants, power stations, military labs, etc etc) in the case of offensive strikes.
The point is that none of these targets require the power of nuclear/thermonuclear weapons. FAE (fuel-air explosion) is approximately 5x as powerful as the equivalent mass of TNT. As a matter of fact, our military advisors reccomend that we abstain from using them much, because they're so powerful they look like nukes. With none of the messy cleanup/politics of having tossed heavy unstable metals all over the place. Unless you're trying to take out mountain-bunkers (NORAD, etc) you don't really need nuclear weapons to do it.
To most directly answer your question: if someone starts tossing around high-yield nuclear weapons, that person is a threat to EVERY nation on earth, and has indirectly attacked them via environmental damage. This implicit declaration of war is all it would take for most countries to send some toys over (sir, there's a US carrier group en route. uhhhhh...) and end that little problem. Since nobody is crazy enough to WANT that to happen (see previous example re: glass-floor), nukes are generally saved for last-ditch counterstrikes. Thus, in a way, nukes are solely defensive weapons.
I'm not worried until they get retroviral capability. (Viruses that modify DNA) Of course, when that happens, we better have something to stop viruses, cause we're all capital-s-screwed if something goes awry.
Actually, the spectre of Katzism has overtaken me. Retroviruses are just a tool. If we found that altering a bit of a chromosome would cure disease, why not?
Maybe these IQ 165 people will develop semiautonomous robots to dig ditches for them...
As far as war goes, I personally don't forsee war happening. With the UN and all, it's pointless to attack someone, because you're sanctioned into depression. Not to mention the US likes to wave its big, angry, Teddy-Roosevelt-on-crack stick at people. Cruise missiles provide a politically "safe" (no pilot to kill/capture) way of blowing stuff up. *Terrorism*, maybe. But not formally declared wars.
Incidentally, I believe the USMC has a program to develop some kind of very-small-very-smart mobile artillery platform. But consider that unreliable at best, I can't even remember where I heard it.
This all will still not solve society's largest problem: Katz will still complain about the robots.
>Military pilots have an entire array of informative widgits other than nightvission for use when landing...
I actually know a little about this... someone I know very well does DOD acquisitions, and in the last few years bought FLIR (forward looking infra-red) pods. They ran a little over $2k....
Another thing to consider, airfields and carrier decks have lights on them, something country roads usually don't.
As for the people relying on the system too much, give people little transponders, and the wrist-thingies beep when a certified moron (transmitted by car microwave dish) is approaching. If the car detects an entity without a transponder, it must be an animal. That's where the grille-mounted gauss rifle comes into play...
"Roadkill" would never be the same
I'd guess oncoming traffic appears as a blob with a bright block (front radiator), and cars ahead of you either one or two points (exhaust)
While it's probably good for detecting cars, how can it detect people that well? I'd guess in the summer south of the Mason-Dixon line a person wouldn't show up very well, unless the thing has some ridiculous gain. But then another car on the road would make it auto-attenuate back down. Maybe it calls anything above ambient an object and displays a 'on' pixel for it.
Did anyone read about the reverse-collision thing? It says it works when you're going >= 3mph in reverse. Now if I were paranoid enough about backing in to get this, why would I be going in over 3mph, especially when I get close? Typo or something?
Two words... electromagnetic pulse. Hee hee.
"Duh, why are you wrapped in aluminum foil?"
"Oh, no reason."
Notice the qualification on the website, that the 43% is achieved when calling some weird 3com equipment.
Car Wars *does* exist. I believe they even came out with a third edition a while ago. Existential blue crayon launchers, anyone? It's over at Steve Jackson Games